Friday, August 19, 2016

Disparate impact rehashed

An interesting Washington Post column about the efforts by the Department of Justice to end "implicit bias", linked by Powerline, ironically makes the point of critics if one reads it carefully. That is, the DOJ is more or less rehashing the old 1960s doctrines of "disparate impact" by looking at overall incidence of arrests, etc., and not comparing those arrest rates with things like conviction rates.

In other words, it's a classic error of using the wrong measurement. If blacks were being victimized, one would anticipate that their portion of arrests and deaths at the hands of police would greatly exceed their portion of convictions, but that is not the case--it's actually the opposite in terms of deaths at the hands of police.

So what's going on? Well, in the name of appealing to black voters, the Department of "Justice" is choosing to leave criminals at large in black communities. With friends like Barack Obama and Loretta Lynch, blacks don't need enemies.